


Heartbeats

by rainstormdragon



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Breakfast, Cuddling & Snuggling, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Flashbacks, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Married Couple, Married Life, Nightmares, Old Injuries, POV Suki (Avatar), Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Romantic Fluff, Scars, Seagulls are dicks, Sokka (Avatar) Has ADHD, South Pole, Southern Water Tribe, Sukka Week, Sukka Week 2020, Winter, so fcking domestic guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26314135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainstormdragon/pseuds/rainstormdragon
Summary: Several years after the war, the scars and nightmares still linger. Sokka and Suki, now married, find comfort in the stillness of the antarctic winter and the warmth of each other's love and understanding.A late submission for Sukka week, for the prompt, Post-Canon.
Relationships: Sokka/Suki (Avatar)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 93





	Heartbeats

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to @elle for the prompt and @haylestorming for beta and helping with the title!
> 
> CW: Mentions of PTSD nightmares, description of a panic attack.

She was falling. She breathed in the reek of hot metal and knew she would never survive a fall from this height and her lungs ached and her eyes stung and the wind rushed past and this was it, there was no one here to catch her, and she tried to scream though she could not get enough breath for more than a strangled moan--

“Babe, you’re having a nightmare.” 

Suki choked out a muffled sound as she woke with a jerk, gasping. Her heart was pounding in her chest and despite the biting cold where the air touched her skin, she was sweating. 

“Suki, hey, you’re safe,” the same voice said, and she blinked back tears as her husband pulled her against him, rubbing her upper arm reassuringly. His breath was a bloom of warmth against her temple. She huddled into him, just breathing and letting her heartbeat slow before she spoke. 

“Did I wake you?” she murmured.

“Nah. Stupid leg woke me. I think it’s going to snow again before morning,” Sokka grumbled, shifting so he could slide an arm underneath her and hold her closer. “Same nightmare?”

Suki nodded. “Falling.” She had always dreamed of falling, ever since she had been a child. But ever since the airship battle, there were times when the dreams came back with a vengeance, her memory filling in details she’d never have known as a child and taking her back to the closest she’d ever come to death. 

She could go weeks or months, sometimes, without the nightmare resurfacing, but it always did. 

She hadn’t screamed at the time. It had all happened too fast. But somehow, the worst part of the dreams was screaming and screaming and being unable to make more than the faintest soft sound. The knowledge that no one could hear her. 

She shivered and Sokka wrapped himself more tightly around her. Though the shiver hadn’t been one of cold, she gratefully soaked up his body heat. It must be a gift of his Water Tribe heritage, the way his body seemed to hold onto warmth even in the arctic chill. When they were in the Fire Nation, it felt like more of a curse-- he ended up plastered against her in a sweaty heap and they both woke up overheated and gross. But here in the sunless night of antarctic winter, Suki was nothing but grateful for it. 

“You want me to rub that ointment on your leg?” She asked him.

“Right, I keep forgetting about it,” Sokka said, and sat up for a moment to rummage for it in a drawer, finding it effortlessly in the dim light of their little oil lamp. He pressed the container into Suki’s hand. She opened it and sat up, pulling one of the furs around her shoulders, and Sokka shifted to move his leg into her lap. Suki found the place on his lower leg where his muscles had knotted up around the healed break from the airship battle years ago. She massaged some of the herbal ointment in. Sokka sighed, long and soft, at her touch, and affectionately curled his good leg around her. 

“You’re my favorite wife,” he told her. She snorted. She was his only wife. She rubbed the tension from the knotted muscle, watching the faintly flickering light from the lamp dance on the walls. The South Pole was a strange place, and she was not sure she would ever get used to it. 

When they had married, the two of them had settled on an arrangement where they split the year in thirds. The first third of the year, they spent with Sokka’s home tribe, taking a steamboat down in the heart of winter when those who lived there year-round were in need of fresh supplies, energy, and news of the outside world. Sokka spent his time there helping his father plan improvements to the community and teaching the kids while Suki worked with the elders to write down their legends and oral history. The second third of the year was spent on Kyoshi Island, where Suki trained the new troop of young Kyoshi warriors and Sokka worked on the local fishing boats. 

The last third of the year was spent in Caldera City, where Sokka took a turn as the Southern Water Tribe Ambassador, allowing the other ambassador, Nanouk, to return with her family in time to help with the autumn hunt. While they stayed at the palace, Suki was able to reunite with and train with her original troop of Kyoshi warriors, who were now Fire Lord Zuko’s personal guard. 

These icy, dark, eerie winters still felt surreal to her, though. They had a rhythm of their own, like the slow, giant heartbeat of a whale-walrus. One told time by the stars, rather than the sun -- Sokka had needed to teach her how that first year -- and it was a time of study and storytelling, planning and dreaming and prayer. The tribe’s enduring sense of community was punctuated with moments of intense, soul-piercing loneliness that seemed to be as much a part of the tundra as the towering glaciers. The South Pole was all sharp contrasts like that: pale snow and black ocean, chill wind and crackling fires. 

Their time here both centered her and unsettled her a little. It was a brutal, lovely land, a place for shamans and warriors and poets. Living here, even for only part of the year, had given her a new understanding of her husband, and why he was the man he had become. She was always relieved to sail off when four months had passed. Yet she was always glad to return the next year and cocoon herself again in the little underground home they had built together. 

When she had rubbed the tension from his leg, she wriggled back into the nest of furs that was their bed. Sokka turned to curl against her, his hand resting possessively on her abdomen and his breath tickling the hairs at the nape of her neck. He sighed dramatically when she put her cold feet on his warm ones, but let her. Neither of them was going to fall back asleep right away, but just lying spooned together like this was restful in its own way. She stroked his arm lightly. 

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him. Sokka was always thinking of half a dozen random things at the same time-- it was how his mind worked-- and his answer to that question always proved entertaining. This time was no exception. 

“Whether it would be too early to get up and make breakfast. How to create a snow vehicle that isn’t powered by bending or steam. That I need to help fix Gran-Gran’s roof tomorrow. How the weather makes things inside us hurt differently than usual even though the weather isn’t actually inside us, and that’s weird. The time a seagull stole my snowshoe when I was fourteen and I had to try and get home with only one snowshoe. How much I like your butt.”

“You never told me the snowshoe story. Can I hear it?” she asked. She wiggled her butt playfully against him and felt him respond, his hips pressing back against hers. She could hear the smile in his voice as he began to talk. 

He managed to make the story of what must have been a mildly traumatic experience funny with his dry, sarcastic telling of it. It was no wonder that Sokka was such a compulsive planner; he had grown up with the keen knowledge that losing something like a hat or a pair of snowshoes could be the difference between life and death. In the end, he’d constructed a makeshift snowshoe from a branch, some sticks, fishing line, and some leather torn from his tunic. It had broken multiple times on the walk home. 

Partway through the story, she rolled over in his arms to rest her head against his chest. He trailed his hand idly up and down her back idly and she relaxed into his touch. 

“What do you think the seagull did with it?” she asked when he had finished his story. 

Sokka shrugged. “Who knows? Seagulls are assholes. They’ll steal fish out of your boat or food out of your hand, if you’re not careful. That’s why gull meat is mostly saved for elders. They’ve gotten to build up years of resentment against them.”

“I thought it was because it was easier for them to chew.”

“That too.” Sokka shrugged. “But you’ve never seen how gleefully they hunt them in the summer. There’s contests for who can catch the most with just their hands.”

“Just their _hands?”_ Suki repeated, startled. 

“You build a little mini snow hut just big enough for a gull with a back door you can stick your hand through and put a piece of blubber in there, and then wait with your hand perfectly still in there for a gull to reach in and try to get the blubber. Then you grab its neck and strangle it,” Sokka explained. “Someone who’s been doing it for years gets _scary_ quick at it. You can catch them with bait on a hook, too. That’s how kids usually do it. But catching them by hand is a test of skill. It’s how old men show off to old women that they haven’t lost their edge.”

Suki smiled and Sokka nuzzled her affectionately. 

“Someday I’m gonna catch you so many gulls,” he promised her, and she knew enough of his culture by now to understand what that meant. 

A Water Tribe man promising to hunt for you in his old age was like an Earth Kingdom man promising to keep you dressed in silks. Food was the most precious of resources here. Sokka was saying that he planned to lavish wealth on her even when he was too old to go out with the hunters. 

“Love you,” she said softly, reaching up to run her hands through his hair. 

He slid his fingers under the hem of her sleep shirt and traced patterns on her lower back that made her shiver and press her body against his. “Love you more,” he replied.

“... Wanna make an early breakfast then go back to bed?” Suki suggested.

“Is that allowed?” Sokka asked.

“We’re adults, we can do what we want.” 

“Have I ever told you how smart you are? Because you are so smart,” he told her. She smiled, pressed a quick kiss to his jaw, and extracted herself from his arms to grab the koala-wool sweater beside the bed. Without leaving the sleeping furs, she pulled it on, along with a pair of thick stockings before sliding out to put on the sealskin pants and parka that Sokka’s Gran-Gran had made for her as a wedding gift.

“Get the stove lit while I get some meat, would you, babe?”

Sokka, with the careless ease of someone who clearly thought their home was a reasonable temperature despite the fact that they could see their breath, got out of bed without so much as bothering with a shirt and went to kneel by the stove in the main room. Suki stepped into her boots, pulled up her hood, put on her mittens, and climbed up and out of the house, wincing as she opened the door and was greeted by a cold that made her face sting. 

She trudged the handful of yards to the cold storage box, unlatched it, and was about to pull it open to retrieve some freeze-dried meat when a sharp wind hit her and the cold of it knocked the breath from her lungs. Suddenly her hands went numb and she struggled to catch a full breath and the wind rushed loudly in her ears and she couldn’t scream --

Her vision was beginning to go gray around the edges when she heard him.

“Suki. Suki, are you okay?”

She swallowed the remembered taste of smoke and metal and tried to respond, but nothing came out. Then she felt hands on her shoulders, turning her around, and Sokka was looking down into her face, his eyes worried. She gripped handfuls of his parka. Then he was pressing his lips to her silently parted ones, breathing startling warmth into her lungs. When he pulled away, he pressed a mittened hand to her lips lightly. 

“Breathe in through your nose when you’re outside, remember? That’s what noses are for, to warm up the air before it gets into your chest.” 

Suki nodded weakly and made herself breathe through her nose as he held her, nuzzling her face into the still-open neck of his parka to warm it against his skin. 

Stupid, so stupid. She knew how to breathe through her nose, knew how to feel wind on her face and not panic and think she was falling. The dream had come back with such crystal clarity, and realizing that she was unable to make a sound…

“How did you know I needed you?” she asked Sokka in a quiet, scratchy voice. 

“You’d been out here a few minutes longer than usual and I guess I just got a feeling all the sudden?” She’d been out here for that long? She blinked. He squeezed her mittened hands in his. “Flashback?”

Suki nodded. He kissed her forehead lightly and let go of her to retrieve the meat she’d been going to get from the storage box and relatch it. Then he took her hand and pulled her back inside. While she numbly took off her boots and parka, Sokka left everything but sleep pants and socks in a heap on the floor by the entrance. Suki watched appreciatively as he efficiently hacked the frozen meat into a couple pieces and put them in a pan of warming water to thaw, then filled her teapot and set it to heat on the stove as well. She crossed the room and sat down on a cushion, still a little shaky. 

“I couldn’t scream. But you heard me,” she said. 

He came to sit beside her, and she noticed that for all his seeming ease of movement, he was favoring his left leg again. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to cry. 

“You still heard me.”

Sokka wrapped his arms around her. “We rescue each other, remember? That’s what we do.”

She squeezed him tightly back. “That’s what we do,” she repeated. He was hers. She was his. The war was over, and while they would never be free from the scars and memories, they still had the rest of their lives to make new memories. To heal, somehow, eventually. 

Here in the still-surreal present, underground and safe from the wind, they fried rich seal meat and slices of seaweed-bread, and drank strong, sweet tea. Then Suki pulled her husband back into the warmth of the furs and made love to him as the snow swirled down outside. As he dozed beside her afterward (sprawled face-down with one arm wrapped firmly around her), she sent up a silent prayer to the spirits.

_Let us keep this fragile new world. Let us grow like vines over the ruins._

_Let us rescue each other, again and again and again._


End file.
